Buccino's bus and rail commuting tales and
observations are collected in this new 224-page book which is available in print, on Amazon
and Nook.

Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow
Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal
professional web pages in Jersey City and later at the NewsCorp building in the
Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually
drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20
minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to
his parking lot near the Hudson River. It wasn't long before the crosstown
traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded
the author to use mass transportation to get to work for the first time ever.

For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation
including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's
PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in
metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New
Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many
of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

Commuters who knew he wrote for NJ.com would seek him out
and tell him their commuter tales of woe. Often they would simply commiserate
and try to see who had a worse ride in that day. But more than once, Buccino
was button-holed after a scathing piece on, say, homeless people's trash in the
Newark Subway, and told that it was cleaned up within hours of his writing
about it online.

For the most part, the items collected in This Seat Taken?
are short, so readers and commuters can pick it up and read at random, or read
as far as they can before their own stop. Then, it's easy to pick up where you
left off or try pot-luck in the four sections of the book.

This collection is available in print and as an ebook
because when he wasn't busy writing notes about his commute, Buccino was
reading a newspaper, paperback or an ebook. "My first generation Kindle
got me through a lot of long, long waits at the Port Authority Bus Terminal
when no one from the bus company would tell us what was going on and the lines
stretched down the halls, down the escalators and back out into the
lobby," Buccino said.

"It's hard to believe I once had a job where I drove 40
miles each way to work. I was changing the oil in my car every three
months," Buccino said. "Then for more than 10 years I mostly drove to
the bus stop and home and out for groceries once a week. I practically forgot
how to drive.

"And something strange happened in the years I was
commuting. People who drive cars all went screwy. They pull out in front of
you. They don't use their turn signals. They drive above the speed limit. These
days, drivers hold conference calls and write emails while they are driving on
the road. That's one group of people I don't want to read this book, at least
not while they are driving," Buccino said. "Perhaps they should set
their ereaders to read This Seat Taken aloud as they sit in a traffic jam
wondering if I'm on a bus passing them in the express lane."

In 2008, Buccino published "Voices on the Bus, Train,
Subway, Bus and in My Head," a collection of non-rhyming verse written
while commuting from northeastern Essex County to Jersey City, N.J.